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In the original preface to his primary doctoral thesis Folie et déraison, Michel Foucault thanked three men as intellectual mentors and influences on his work. In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in December 1970 the same three names were invoked: Georges Canguilhem, Georges Dumézil and Jean Hyppolite. The relation between these figures individually with Foucault has been discussed in varying degrees of detail, but this article explores the intellectual affinities and tensions between the three older men. Canguilhem and Hyppolite had been contemporaries at the École normale supérieure in the 1920s, then colleagues in Strasbourg, and perhaps most visibly they took part in a television interview mediated by Alain Badiou and Dina Dreyfus in 1965. While Dumézil and Hyppolite were colleagues at the Collège de France, they appear never to have discussed each other’s work. Nor does Dumézil discuss Canguilhem, but Canguilhem importantly discusses both Dumézil and Hyppolite. The focus here is on Canguilhem’s review of Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, in which he indicates the understated importance of Dumézil to that book; and a report of a largely unknown seminar from autumn 1970 when Foucault discussed Dumézil’s work and Canguilhem responded. The article then moves to Canguilhem’s engagement with Hyppolite’s work, especially in his analysis of “Hegel en France,” and the tributes he wrote to his friend and colleague following Hyppolite’s 1968 death. Exploring his reading of two of his great contemporaries helps to resituate Canguilhem within wider philosophical debates in the mid-20th century.